Nelson Malone meets the man from Mush-Nut Book

"We need only turn to that tome of truth and wisdom, the King James Bible, which says, in rich word and apt metaphor, blackness is disease, death, damnation, and despair, as well as basic sin and evil, to understand that the first Negro was Satan. This is why Negroes are born with horns and barbed tails. And why Africa is hot."
The one thing Black folk have for sure achieved since Darius James wrote Negrophobia is being seen. That's really all I mean, we're visible now outside of Ralph Ellison's Samboism and hair-conking honky-catering. We're on TV with faces askance pondering the rituals of whytie for a change, or winning grammys, or writing about The Other, or becoming the president. And people know we're doing it. We finally fit into the scheme of American cultural fantasy that we've been pushing on ourselves since the depression. Its like Mickey Mouse realized he wasn't a magician after all, and it was a bastion of burheads cleaning our his lair in Fantasia 2000 that he didn't quite notice before.

But what still makes James' cynicism so ripe (and so fucking funny) is that this is only an indication of how things have gotten worse. We're proud to base our cultural identity on being Afro-expats that became civilized enough to get a welfare check, but that's as far as we're willing to go. Or maybe that's as far as we can go, claiming anything else will place it alongside this black simulation megaplex enterprises and glom it on to the rotten whole of the American world-eater.

This novel was extremely vulgar, but not as vulgar as I thought it would be. That is one of the reasons I liked it so much, it became apparent that James held some things in such high regard that he couldn't toss them in to the Manhattan technicolor cesspool he was concocting. Off the top of my head three figures are Franz Fanon, Sun Ra (sort of) and, strangely, Louis Armstrong. I think it could be fun to build a list of things that he may find untouchable (or chose not to defile at least) and imagine a better world where black art wasn't so tainted by whyte conceptions of it.